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Even though we share a common language with our friends across the pond (well, to some extent), we often don't see the benefit. The UK is usually bracketed together with the rest of Europe, forcing us to pick up the bill for translations into Spanish, French and so on, even though the so-called "English" version remains blighted with colors and realisations.

However, experts claim the costs of regionalisation are exaggerated by vendors. "I'd be very sceptical about claims that it costs much to tailor a product to a market," says Birmingham University's Professor Fender. "Most of that's already done. Anyway, that's a development cost, which is a fixed cost and, in economic terms, there's no need for fixed costs to have any impact on further price variations."

" Sometimes you have to regionalise, and there are small issues like drop-down menus where

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you can choose between US and English or other languages, or dictionaries, but it doesn't affect the core program and certainly doesn't explain the large variation," agrees Grous.

Take, for example, Adobe, which in a recent email seen by PC Pro claimed it cost as much as $3 million a time to localise Creative Studio 3 into 15 different European languages. Critics question these costs, pointing out that the bulk of the translation work had already been done in earlier versions. "It can't cost anything like that, especially when a lot of that software was already translated," says Adobe watcher Danielle Libine. "My husband's company recently did a translation for a huge SAP human resources program used in 140 countries. He translated that software into 27 languages and did that for less than $400,000."

Libine, who has studied the Adobe pricing model in detail, also points out that several companies - such as Apple, which she says has a 14% mark-up between the US and UK - manage to write these costs into the original software, and don't grossly inflate the European price.

Another favourite line is that the US is cheaper because it's a homogenous market, but as critics point out there are English, Spanish and French versions of most software titles available in the US.

Back to 'Rip-off Britain: excuses exposed'.